Apollo 11

Engineer's Bold Step Led To First Moon Walk

July 17, 1989|By MATHEW PAUST Staff Writer

Eight years before astronaut Neil Armstrong made man's first footprint on the moon, a 42-year-old engineer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton took a giant leap of faith that made that step possible.

Frustrated after nearly two years of failure by NASA's bigwigs to take seriously a Langley-devised plan to put the three astronauts into orbit around the moon before sending two of them to the lunar surface in a separate vehicle, John C. Houbolt fired off a letter that could have cost him his job.

The nine-page letter, dated Nov. 15, 1961, was sent to Robert C. Seamans Jr., who was second in command to NASA chief James Webb.

For Houbolt, then a division head at Langley, contacting Seamans was a considerable hop over several bureaucratic levels - a dangerous thing to do.

"That was a big chance," said Houbolt, now retired and doing consulting engineering for the Air Force. "I could have been fired for going over the regular chain of command."

Houbolt's letter not only confronted the NASA bureaucracy, it also meant taking on the almost mythical Wernher von Braun, the charismatic ex-German rocket scientist who had quickly become a popular symbol of this country's dreams of reaching beyond its own planet.

The letter was written when the space program was still in its infancy. The most that America's space agency had accomplished was one suborbital rocket flight manned by Alan Shepard. The Soviet Union had sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth and brought him safely home.

At the time, NASA was staking its space race catch-up plans on a yet-to-be-built giant rocket that would carry three astronauts directly from the Earth to the moon and then return. Its second choice was a complicated two-rocket scheme that would have required assembly of a lunar module in earth orbit.

A small group of Langley scientists thought these were unnecessarily expensive and dangerous plans.

Houbolt acknowledged his brashness in the letter's intro duction: "I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox, but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted."

His letter's directness compounded the risk.

He got right to the point, arguing vehemently that other plans for getting men to the moon, all receiving more attention from the project's top people, were impractical, or, in one case, what he called "hair-brained."

"For some unexplicable reason everyone seems to want to avoid simple schemes. The majority always seems to be thinking in terms of grandiose plans," the letter said.

He boiled this down to an analogy: "Why not go by Chevrolet instead of a Cadillac?"

Houbolt's role as salesman of the lunar orbiter concept was backed by the engineering work of other Langley researchers, led by Clinton E. Brown, who headed Langley's theoretical mechanics division, and an associate, William Michael, who provided mathematical calculations that supported the theory.

In May 1960, Michael distributed a paper that is believed to be the first written discussion of the concept within NASA.

When Michael's paper was discussed the following December at a meeting of the Space Task Group at NASA's Washington headquarters, "people were screaming that our numbers were wrong," recalled Brown, who left NASA in 1964 to do research in such diverse areas as oceanography and cholesterol.

Houbolt wrote to Seamans that ridiculing Langley's lunar orbital rendezvous plan was appalling.

"I am bothered by stupidity of this type being displayed by individuals who are in a position to make decisions which affect not only the NASA, but the fate of the nation as well," he said.

He also railed at what he saw as cowardice by the various committees studying the problem.

"I have seen the course of an entire meeting change because of an individual not connected with the meeting walking in, looking over shoulders, shaking his head in a negative sense, and then walking out without uttering a word," he told Seamans in the letter.

Included with the letter was a simplified presentation of the Langley plan using graphics to interest people who otherwise might not have bothered with it.

Houbolt concluded that Langley's lunar orbit rendezvous plan "is easier, quicker, less costly, requires less development, less sites and facilities." He estimated later that the Langley method saved taxpayers as much as $23 billion over alternate plans.

Lunar orbit rendezvous, he said in the letter, "will put men on the moon in very short order - and we don't need any Houston empire to do it."

The Houston reference reflected the bitterness felt by many Langley scientists to the moving of the Space Task Group from Langley to Texas that year.

While the Houston group initially opposed lunar orbit rendezvous, Houbolt lobbied many of them personally, finally persuading them of the plan's merit.